Basking in The Limelight

Billy the Kid and four of his gang were delivered to the jail in Las Vegas, New Mexico on December 26, 1880. They were locked up without much fanfare, but in the morning a crowd turned out to see the captured celebrity. “There was a big crowd gazing at me, wasn’t there?” the Kid said to a reporter, who also wrote, “He was the attraction of the show, as he stood there, lightly kicking the toes of his boots on the stone pavement to keep his feet warm, one would scarcely mistrust that he was the hero of the ‘Forty Thieves’ romance which this paper has been running in serial form for six weeks or more.” [Alas, the Las Vegas Gazette newspaper archives for this period were lost in a fire.)

What do you think?

In 1999, Bob Boze Bell and partners bought True West magazine (published since 1953) and moved the editorial offices to Cave Creek, Arizona. Bell has published and illustrated books on Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, as well as Classic Gunfights, an Old West gunfight book series. His latest books are The 66 Kid and True West Moments.